


Red Like Blood, Black Like Guilt

by EmperorRen



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: After “Last Day on Earth”, Alexandria Safe-Zone, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Universe, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Flashbacks, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shame, Survivor Guilt, rick blames himself for everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 13:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16450919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmperorRen/pseuds/EmperorRen
Summary: In the mornings, while she sleeps, Rick Grimes hears his demons loud and clear.





	Red Like Blood, Black Like Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> This has been brewing for literal years, so it has to be labeled “EU” even though the divergence is mostly in relationships: Rick is with Maggie Rhee, a year or so after the events of “Last Day on Earth”. Negan is imprisoned, just like now. Otherwise, it’s 100% canon-compliant for that point in time. There are a couple of lines describing Glenn’s death in here, so if you’re squicked by that, just watch out.
> 
> NOTE: I am absolutely and utterly pro-Richonne! I LOVE them together. This is... just a thing lying around in my brain. I’m so sorry. 
> 
> Also, the title comes from a phrase I wrote many, many moons ago, took as the title for a song on my band’s EP(“Black, Like Guilt”), and am now resurrecting for this tale.

The mornings are always the worst.

Not the dawn itself, when the world shrouded by the long night — and since everything has come unraveled, the nights always seem so much longer, endless ticking seconds of survival — is finally, slowly illuminated like a spotlight on an empty stage. The dawn brings light; and that light reveals the shape of responsibility, of motion, of reason.

It brings a respite from nightmares... at least, the ones he has while he’s asleep.

For the waking ones, there are the mornings.

He lies in the absolute darkness, listening to her breathe beside him, and all that silence is like being buried in a grave heavy with soil and guilt. It is the mornings, those empty hours between midnight and sunrise, when he hears the voices of those they’ve lost most clearly, and he wonders what he must be by now: a walker in his own right, reanimated not by some freakish infection but by the ghosts of his own vanished dead. He moves forward, sure; _get busy living or get busy dying_ has never been more literal. But he knows that he carries the past like a backpack full of bricks that he can never set down, and he knows they know that, too. It’s become a part of him, grafted to his flesh and heart like a parasite.

Are they all the same? He’s never asked. If Carol sees Sophia everywhere, in every child; if she can never think of herself without adding _Ed’s wife, Sophia’s mother_ to that picture. If Daryl thinks of Merle every time he kicks his roaring, belching monstrosity of a bike to life; if he carries the image of his brother’s face turned pale and turgid, Merle’s teeth a sheen of blood and flesh, into every herd he dispatches. Michonne, Ezekiel, Rosita... they’ve all lost people. People they loved, people they needed. But are they haunted by those losses in every moment, with every breath?

He doesn’t know. He’s never asked.

Even Negan has lost someone; this Rick Grimes has heard, the story of lost Lucille, and it is in the mornings that Rick wonders in the endless raven-cracked silence if Negan might be the only one who really understands. Negan with his obsessive fixation on the murder bat, the barbed-wire monstrosity that has somehow come to symbolize a person that he was never ready to let go of.

The thought is horrifying.

But it is also the mornings, especially now as the colder air begins to creep in through the windows she keeps just barely open while they sleep, that the thought keeps him awake and restless, wracked with guilt and feeling like a traitor to the woman who lies beside him.

The woman who shares his bed as she shares his grief; but not his guilt.

She has her own, Rick knows: no one who was there that night and is still drawing breath escaped unmarked. He knows that more than anyone; he can see it in their eyes because he sees it in his own, every time he confronts his reflection. But hers — _why him? Why not me? Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t—what could I—why?_ — is a pain he knows intimately.

He’d known it at the prison, before his mind cleaved apart and he’d escaped into a fog of lunacy and grief. Could he have saved Lori? Could he have gotten there sooner? Which decision was the wrong one, the fatal one? Did she even still love him? Was Judith his? Did it matter?

He’ll never know.

And he carries her memory like he carries the rest, not a remembrance but something alive: hungry. Needful. Restless. Demanding recompense every waking moment.

Heavy.

His shoulders are weary from carrying the lively corpses of the dead.

Like Hershel. And Beth. And Abraham. And Sasha. And Glenn.

 _Glenn_.

It is between them always; Rick knows that, too. Even in the dark when he curls against the warmth of her body, wraps his arms around her too-slim frame and breathes her in, he can feel Glenn there like the ghost of betrayals yet to come. Rick has heard her cry out his own name in the stillness, her forearms locked behind his neck; and even as he rests his head in the hollow of her shoulder, feeling her fingers work through his sweat-damp curls, he has caught himself thinking: _it should be him here with you, Maggie. It should have been him. Not me._

What’s worse is that in those moments, he wonders if she’s thinking the same thing.

If every time he reaches for her, every time she smiles, locked behind her teeth is the unspoken reminder that Glenn is not here, and Rick is...

...and that this fact is entirely Rick’s fault.

The dead never rest.

Oh, they’ve talked about it a little — about how it could be just as easily laid at Daryl’s feet, his ill-timed rage the trigger for Negan’s reprisal

 _(but she forgave Daryl, don’t forget,_ the mornings often whisper, _he couldn’t have known, and the weight between their eyes is not drowning them)_

or how it is all on Negan, with his ironclad rules and his jaunty red scarf and almost comically foul mouth.

Negan with his baseball bat, backlit by the glare of white headlights, a stalking shadow with his boots crunching in the dirt and blood dripping from his jacket.

Negan with the axe, Negan and Rick alone in the SUV in a fog-shrouded surreal hell that ended as it began: with blood. With scorched-Earth silence.

With death.

And with guilt.

Yes, it was Negan who killed Glenn... but it was Rick Grimes who had led them there. With every choice, every arrogant step, he’d dug a shovelful of earth from Glenn’s grave.

Does Maggie see that failure every time she looks at him?

Rick thinks she might.

In the mornings he knows that they’re bound together by this grief, this guilt; just like they’re bound together by the losses they suffered to get to this point. Maggie’s hands slick with Lori’s blood, cradling newborn Judith: one life exchanged for another in a transaction as brutal as this world has become. Hershel murdered with Michonne’s katana, Sophia turned( _and who lost her? whose gun was it,_ his mind leers in the pre-dawn darkness, _that put her down, when it finally came to that? Carol may understand now, so very much later, but a part of her mind will always see you there when the horror was new, when it was fresh_ ), Sasha dead in the casket, Denise slaughtered by Dwight, Shane...

Shane.

And Lori.

And Abraham.

And Glenn.

The endless parade goes round and round.

Sometimes Rick thinks he will go mad in this dark; that he will crack at last not as a relief from guilt and loss but in final and complete acceptance of it. That he’ll exist with his ghosts tearing him apart for his sins and that that, in the end, is only fitting.

And yet she stays.

He loves her: of that he has no doubt. The warmth he’d felt for her since her father’s farm, the affection and admiration for her strength, her no-nonsense demeanor, her ability to see hope and good in the darkest times... these things have shifted into a deeper bond. Her voice, with its farm-girl lilt and the steel beneath, has lifted him time and again from the depths of self-pity, of despair. She has been a rock, a warrior despite herself, and even little things — the way her hair falls into her eyes while she’s working, or her struggle to find a pair of work gloves that aren’t almost ridiculously oversized — make his heart swell in a way that terrifies him. She loves him; she has told him so, and she has no reason to lie.

And they’re good together. She balances out his wilder impulses with the voice of reason — usually — and they both have the power to inspire those around them to reach for a better world, a brighter future.

But reaching is all Rick feels like he can do, sometimes: like his feet are mired in tar and there are fingers grasping at his back. As if the moment he dares to try to step forward, the ghosts of his past will howl in outrage at this denial and lay waste to everything he builds. So he carries them; he feeds them with his blood, his tears, his dreams.

She uses the past to create a foundation for her future.

He cannot escape from his.

Rick wonders often what Maggie sees when she looks at him. In these mornings he desperately wants to know: he needs to know, because he doesn’t know himself anymore what exactly he is. That naïve deputy, lost in a larger world and beholden to everyone, is long gone... but he’s in there, somewhere. So is the man prone to grief hallucinations and the man who once bit out the throat of a piece of human garbage to protect the son he loved more than life.

And so is the man who sobbed and pleaded on his knees, smeared in dirt and Maggie’s husband’s blood, screaming out his horror and denial and shame at the last as Negan, gleeful in his dominion, broke him while the others watched.

The ones who trusted him.  
The ones who believed in him.  
The ones he failed.

Failed, like he failed Glenn.  
And Maggie.

Rick knows that his own guilt, his grief, must be nothing compared to hers, even now; he feels dirty even feeling it, when she has lost so much more. So he says nothing, only watches her in the dark, wondering if they are together out of love or if this horror, this thing they can’t talk about, has driven them together like children afraid of the monsters in the night. If they are separate from the others in their shared rage and mourning... the way they are separate from each other, and, for the life of him, Rick does not know how to close that gap.

Letting go of Glenn feels like the filthiest kind of treason and he’d never say it out loud; yet Rick knows that Maggie is impatient with his guilt even though she herself doesn’t realize it. _I lost my husband,_ the unspoken accusation, _the father of my child, I watched Negan crush his skull to pulp there in front of me and you lost, what? Your pride?_

Yet that’s unfair, and Rick knows that too; at the very least, unfair to both the truth and Maggie’s compassionate nature. Yet there is hardness underneath that compassion, no doubt straight from her father who’d been the same, and Rick knows that she has no time for his wallowing in guilt and shame.

This knowledge shames him more.

He thinks she blames him because he blames himself, and he cannot accept that she might forgive him, because he can’t forgive himself.

Forgiving himself feels like letting go, and that is the one thing he cannot do. If he doesn’t carry them, who will? Who will remember

_(abraham. sasha. andrea. sophia, who he left alone to die in terror. denise. t-dog. lori. shane. hershel, his best voice, his conscience, the man who saved carl’s life yet he couldn’t return the favor. beth, who died leaving her sister almost alone in the world. merle. so many others. and the voice, crackling with static but making his heart jump like a startled cat: “hey! dumbass!” saving. saving his life.)_

them?

In the mornings, Rick knows that confronting this chasm between them, this shared darkness that they know as completely as they have come to know each other’s bodies, will either bring them closer together or finally shatter them apart forever.

They cannot keep this up.

He knows he needs to tell her, to sick up this awful poison before it rots whatever it is that they have found together: because there are moments when he wants it to work between them so badly he weeps. They know each other as few people ever can, as no one before the apocalypse really _could_ have; and that is a gift that is not easily squandered. Not here, not now, in this world.

And he does love her.

They need to talk; they need to make Glenn’s specter visible, knowable, recognizable. They need to see, in the end, if the sum of the two of them together is greater than their guilt. If they can build on the past and not be buried by it.

Maggie turns to him in her sleep, and Rick glances at her for a moment before shifting to his side and pulling her warmth closer to his body. It’s pleasant, and safe, and he closes his eyes. _It should have been him, here with you._

_I’m sorry, Maggie. God, my god, I’m so sorry._

They _will_ talk, he swears to himself.

In the morning.

 


End file.
